Underground or buried vaults, pits chambers or boxes used in the utilities, security, and rail line sectors or other industries can contain co-axial or optical fiber, copper cable as well as gas, water and power lines and other conduits, industrial valves, WI-FI antennas, etc. Vaults and pits for underground utilities often need to be opened for making repairs or for enhancing services. Typically, utility vaults and pits include a concrete, polymer concrete, composite or plastic lid which is opened by a tool or pick with a hook at one end. The lid includes an identification placard or “puck” on its upper surface to identify the owner of the vault or other information such as the type of industry or equipment contained within the vault.
In the course of using the underground box, the cover or lid may be installed at approximately grade level. These covers or lids of various materials such as plastic, concrete, polymer concrete and fiber reinforced composites are secured in place by various means such as straight bolts or L-bolts etc. The bolt typically passes through the cover and into the underground box where it is screwed into a retained nut or similar device thus fastening the cover to the box.
Previously, utility vault lids have been produced with owner or industry information molded onto the lid. Molding information limits the ability to redirect product to different users or build a generic inventory to be labeled prior to delivery. Consequently, because utility vaults and their associated lids are utilized across many industries and customers, manufacturers produced the lids without customer or industry specific identification. Once the vault and corresponding lid was sold to the end customer and placed into service an identification placard was positioned on the lid. Typically the identification placard is a tag having a post which was then positioned within a hole located through the lid and a fastener was positioned on the post from the bottom surface of the lid to retain the tag on the lid.
Problems with this type of fastening method included requiring access to both sides of the lid to install the identification placard. Depending upon the size of the vault and associated lid, such an installation method was cumbersome for particularly large lids. Further, such a method required the use of tools and traditional fasteners such as a threaded nut would work their way loose and fall into the vault potentially damaging expensive equipment. Further, the identification tag could become disengaged from the lid. Adhesives have also been used to retain identification placards however adhesives commonly failed leading to being banned by many utilities and agencies.
Another problem associated with this fastening method, in addition to fastening and retention problems, is that there was no provision for orienting the tag on the lid allowing the tag to rotate during installation or through actual use making the interpretation of the information on the tag more difficult to read. This method lead to the requirement of having a completely separate orientation feature for the placard and lid spaced away from the post adding to the cost and complexity of manufacture.
Therefore a need exists for an improved fastening system for attaching an identification placard to a lid or cover for an underground, grade level or above ground vault, pit, chamber or box which addresses the drawbacks of previous fastening systems.